YOU SAY IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY!

ON JANUARY 3, 1966, George Martin celebrated his fortieth birthday with his fiancée Judy Lockhart Smith by his side. With marriage in the offing, George's future shone brightly. On the professional front, he had just completed production work on Rubber Soul, the Beatles' latest studio album and their sixth straight UK chart-topper. The long-player had proven to be pioneering in every sense of the word. As George later observed, "I think Rubber Soul was the first of the albums that presented a new Beatles to the world. Up to this point, we had been making albums that were rather like a collection of their singles and now we really were beginning to think about albums as a bit of art in their own right. We were thinking about the album as an entity of its own, and Rubber Soul was the first one to emerge in this way." Like Paul McCartney, George perceived the album as a result of a growing collaboration between himself and the Beatles, as opposed to the more authoritative position that he had assumed with earlier projects. Previously, George "had a lot of control — we used to record the stuff, and leave him to mix it, pick a single, everything," Paul later remarked. "After a while though, we got so into recording we'd stay behind while he mixed it, watching what he was doing." But for his part, John Lennon had already begun to see the bandmates' working relationship with George evolving even further still. "We were getting better technically and musically, that's all. We finally took over the studio," John observed. "With Rubber Soul, we were more precise about making the album — that's all. We took over the cover and everything."

Forced to produce the long-player between the Beatles' stints on the road, George had delivered Rubber Soul in breakneck fashion. Recorded between October 12 and November 15, 1965, the album was mastered for release and in the shops by December 3, along with the band's latest single, "Day Tripper" backed with "We Can Work It Out." In the space of slightly more than fifty days, George and the Beatles had brought sixteen new tracks to fruition and into the hands of Beatles fans across the globe. Such was the pace in those heady days of midperiod Beatlemania. As it happened, there was no rest for the bandmates, who performed eighteen concerts that same month on their UK winter tour. Not surprisingly, by the time the new year rolled around, the Beatles were drained. But the same could hardly be said for their producer, who had just concluded another banner year in which his acts had reigned atop the charts, and who also ended his long-standing employment with the EMI Group to establish a consortium of producers known as Associated Independent Recording — or AIR for short. But rather than giving in to exhaustion, George had been buoyed by the exhilarating experience of going into business for himself. As George later observed, "My workload was enormous so that I was spending more time in the studio than I was anywhere else. And I found myself completely and utterly wrapped up in my work."

By Thursday, January 6, 1966, George was back in the studio with the Beatles. Only this time, George and the bandmates weren't in the studio to tackle new material for their waiting world of hungry consumers. And the studio, for that matter, wasn't the friendly environs of good old Number 2 at Abbey Road that they knew so well. Instead, George and the Beatles had gathered a few miles further south at Cine-Tele Sound Studios (CTS). Located in Kensington Gardens Square in London's tony Bayswater district, CTS opened for business in 1956, having been constructed in a converted banquet hall that formerly served Whiteley's Gentleman's Dining Club. With its ornate, crown-molded ceilings reaching a height of twenty-six feet, the banquet hall was rather large, measuring forty feet across and eighty-five feet deep. During its heyday, the hall had also functioned as a runway for parading the latest European fashions. But by the time that George and the Beatles alighted there in January 1966, the cavernous space enjoyed renown as the go-to place for cinema and television soundtrack recording. George himself had recorded there many times as the bandleader behind the George Martin Orchestra. In the mid-1960s, George lauded CTS as "the best film-recording studio in London." Indeed, as a converted recording studio space, it didn't disappoint. CTS could accommodate some sixty-five musicians and — most importantly for George's purposes — the room produced a natural reverberation of 0.8 seconds.

When George and the bandmates assembled at CTS on that frigid Thursday morning, they had come expressly for the reverb. With only a matter of hours to spare, they had been tasked with touching up — if not rerecording entirely — the ragged audio from the group's August 15, 1965, performance at New York City's Shea Stadium, where they had delivered a record-setting concert for more than fifty-five thousand screaming fans. With its natural reverb, CTS seemed like the perfect venue for carrying out the necessary touch-up work for the audio portion of their thirty-four-minute gig. According to chief maintenance engineer Peter Harris, the building had one major drawback: "Underneath the studio were the storage cellars of the furniture company next door (Frederick Lawrence & Co.), so at crucial times you'd hear these steel-wheeled trolleys being trundled around downstairs. One had to rush round and beg the gentleman who controlled the loading bay to get these guys to lay off for a little while."

As it happened, George and the Beatles' mission at CTS was time sensitive. BBC One was slated to broadcast a documentary devoted to the Shea Stadium concert on March 1, and the existing audio simply wasn't up to par. This issue was of paramount concern to the bandmates, given that manager Brian Epstein's NEMS Enterprises, along with the Beatles' Subafilms and American television personality Ed Sullivan, were acting as coproducers for the project. George and the Beatles had pointedly refused to release their 1964 and 1965 Hollywood Bowl performances given the atrocious state of the original recordings. But with NEMS's own money on the line, things were very different this time around. George...